Julia ConleyFacing rising costs of goods and housing, an ongoing pandemic and the threat of other public health crises, and high levels of stress, Americans are more likely than ever to rate themselves as"suffering"Since 2008, the polling firm has measured Americans' quality of life by asking them to rate their lives on a scale of 0 to 10. This month, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question, more than 5% of respondents—5.
Since November 2021, when the Omicron variant began spreading rapidly across the U.S., the percentage of people who describe themselves as thriving has dropped from 59% to just 51.2%. The share of people classified as suffering has grown gradually since the beginning of the pandemic, as the country has gone through the racial justice uprising of 2020, a continuing crisis of gun violence, and attacks on reproductive freedom across the U.S. as well as inflation and other crises related to the economy.